Touch Wood

Adil Writer’s solo exhibition at Pitanga, Touch Wood, explores the dialogue between salvaged carpentry beams and pristine white porcelain, uniting disparate materials through shared stories of transformation. Working from Studio Mandala in Auroville’s verdant forests, I rescue cut-off beams from carpentry workshops; timber destined to become firewood, …and pair it with white porcelain forms fired in my studio’s kiln affectionately called “Soda Upma”!
These beams have weathered years on my terrace, surrendering to South India’s fierce elements: monsoon rains that swell and crack, relentless sun that bleaches and splits, wind that scours surfaces into textured memory. Most of these pieces I’ve torched deliberately, darkening them further, coaxing out deeper contrasts to stand as an equal against kaolin’s soft gentleness.
The porcelain surfaces remain predominantly white, bearing stampings from ancient scripts and linear brush work. Under the crackled matrix of soda, ash and Indian ink, one fleetingly chances upon inscription from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri … “She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire, the luminous heart of the Unknown is she” …words that become texture and meaning simultaneously. In this, we walk the line of the Mother’s observation that true art “must be the expression of a divine world brought down into this material world.”
Touch Wood invites viewers to reconsider waste and value. The wood retains its raw character, saw marks, grain patterns, …evidence of its working life … and subsequent escape; the porcelain carries aspiration and flashes of firings, whispering its tryst with fire. Together, they create meditations on impermanence, sustainability, and the beauty in materials destined for destruction.
“I saw them cross the twilight of an age, the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn”.